Teen Talk

Educational Reform and the Decline of Creativity

By Madison Dalton

Last month marked the onset of FCAT standardized testing in schools around Florida.  I—thank goodness—am a junior this year and have for the most part “done my time” when it comes to these tests.  Thanks to the educational system of Palm Beach County, I have become successfully “standardized”, so to speak, which according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary means that I have been “made to conform to a conspicuous object (as a banner) formerly carried at the top of a pole and used to mark a rallying point especially in battle or to serve as an emblem.” That’s technically true, but in all seriousness, to become standardized means to conform to the expectations set forth by a given authority or tradition.  I personally would rather be an emblem on top of a flag pole, and I actually have highly legitimate reasons for this belief.

As Pablo Picasso once mused, “Every child is an artist; the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” In the past two decades, the subject of education has grown rife with terms such as “educational reform,”  “standardized testing” and “Adequate Yearly Progress.” The issue is in the name on that last one: I’ve met very few successful persons who aimed to be “adequate.”  In 1994, the Clinton Administration passed the Improving America’s school act, marking the start of large-scale standardized testing. The Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act set this testing in stone.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on standardized testing here.  I could get into issues such as the undervaluing of teachers, poor funding, and merit pay, which are all huge problems (what I will say about merit pay is that the phenomenon of latent learning and the fact that different students and groups of students—i.e. E.S.E versus gifted—tend to learn at different paces and at varying levels of independence make the idea of tying a single test to a single teacher absolutely absurd), but I’m attempting to keep frustrated ranting out of this as much as possible.

So, instead, I’m going to focus on the fact that statistically speaking, since the 1990s (strangely coinciding with the birth of mass standardized testing), the creative abilities of American students has decreased.  Yes, there is a test for creativity, much similar to the test for IQ.  It was created in the 1950s by a Professor named E. Paul Torrance and has been administered to millions worldwide. As The Daily Beast reports, Torrence tests are administered by a psychologist, similar to an IQ test, and have proven to be a successful indicator of an individual’s creativity. However, The Daily Beast also explains that Torrence scores have been steadily decreasing since the 1990s, while IQ scores have increased an average of ten points per generation, expounding on the significance of this trend by explaining that recent analysis of the lives of the original Torrence test-takers found that, “the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ”. Dictionary.com defines “creativity as the ability to transcend traditional ideas. (Please note that this is almost exactly opposite to the earlier definition of “standardized”), rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas.” So we’re not just talking artists, actors, musicians, writers, and dancers here. These include engineers, business managers, doctors, architects, and so forth. The age of Ford production lines has passed, and employers of major businesses are now being met with a population of potential employees who are getting less and less creative.  Critical thinking is obviously a crucial life skill, especially for the modern worker.  But instead of teaching kids to think outside the box, we are we give them tests whose names literally mean “conforming to expectations.” In the work-world these students are given a real-life problem and it isn’t multiple-choice. They can’t bubble in the answer on a Scantron. Worse yet, they are not issued a textbook this time.  Many of them balloon up with an overwhelming feeling of indignant apprehension, asking, “How am I supposed to know how to do that?”  And this is where it all counts, too. In real life. It’s so much more than just a letter grade.

Innovation takes guts. Being different requires confidence. And creativity takes courage. And courage is doing something important, fully knowing that you’ll most likely fail, but doing it anyway because it has to be done and no one else is going to get it done if you don’t.  So yes, failure fosters creativity.  Think about Edison’s light bulb conundrum. It takes a lot of burnt potatoes before a light bulb can go off. So, we have set up a perfect system in which kids are handed tests that are label “standardized”—again, seriously? Why don’t we just mass produce babies?—asked to reciprocate one of the pre-written answer choices listed on the page, and then punished with a bad grade if their answer is wrong, and then we all scratch our heads wondering why America is falling behind in the economic race.  Some even argue that it is a result of our standardized testing being too loose.

Moral of the story: we shouldn’t be handing kids essays with topics, mass produced tests, or straight-forward math problems; we should be handing them blank sheets of paper, telling them to get together in a group with other students and express something profound.  Obviously not all assignments can be quite this broad, but the basic premise is there. For some reason in an attempt to leave no child behind, we have tried to create a huge umbrella of thinking that fits all kids, and thus created a monster that relates to no kid, thus leaving all children behind. I guess that’s what happens when politicians try to do the job of educators. A teacher could tell you that each kid is unique. We’re a whole lot closer to snowflakes than we are to packages of salami.  We need to stop coming up with some magical formula that fits all students, and instead ask each student to write his or her own formula for success. Because in the real world, that’s what they’ll be asked to do. We feel like society is getting less intelligent, when IQ scores are increasing. What’s really decreasing is creativity. Artistic genius has become morbidly under-rated in a society focused on purely academic genius. Those of us who don’t have photographic memories can usually just find a phone or a computer and Google instructions now (no offense to anyone who does have a photographic memory; most of us don’t), but we can’t call up Steve Jobs and ask for an innovative way to solve a company problem.

Mozart, Da Vinci, Bach – they spent hours and hours practicing their art in a society that at least somewhat supported them.  These artists aren’t part of an extinct species; they’re part of a starving one. If you go even further back to Socrates and Plateau, you’ll find that their education was filled with critical thinking, dynamic learning methods, and—of course—a creative environment.

We ask ourselves why some students drop out of school and others get burnt out. Well, take it from someone who has spent twelve years in the system; it’s because students are being treated like computers when we’re not. We’re much, much better than a computer.  We actually have an innate propensity for knowledge. We thrive on it. But very few kids have a desire to trudge to school in the morning.  Because more and more in schools, we’re not planting flowers; we’re packaging meat.

Madison Dalton is Junior at Wellington High School.  She is an editor of her school’s online newspaper, WHSWave.com.  She is also an officer on her school’s debate team, National Honors Society, and community service club, Key club.  Madison’s hobbies include writing, running, and drawing.  She aspires to be an author and professional artist.